13th day - from the Sunshine Coast to Whistler

April 20, 2023

Did I already quote the old saying "who can read is clearly at an advantage"? I think so! 🤦‍♂️.

After quickly packing up this morning, we left early without having breakfast to catch the ferry at 9:50 a.m. from Langdale to Horseshoe Bay on the mainland. On the way, we realized that the ferry ⛴️ is actually at 10:50 a.m. Once again, we misread 😡.

However, since we are used to mixing up the times, we made the best of it and went to Gibsons, a small coastal town just before the ferry terminal, to the "Black Bean Café", where according to Brigitte, an expert in cinnamon rolls, there was the best Cinnamon Roll in the world.

The ferry ride was as always uncomplicated and of course there was plenty of scenery. When the "Queen of Surrey" spit us out along with about 300 other cars in Horseshoe Bay, a journey began for us that should outshine all previous journeys in terms of scenery and views.

One can imagine the "Sea to Sky Highway", which led us to Whistler, roughly like this: steep cliffs on our right, occasionally a waterfall coming down, directly on our left the so-called "Howe Sound", a sea arm that goes deep into the land and in front of us the high, snow-covered mountains. That's Canada in its purest form!

And to top it all off and get the absolute overdose of scenery and views, we turned right shortly before Squamish to the "Sea to Sky Gondola", a cable car that takes you to the Skywalk at about 900m height. I actually don't even want to try to describe the view from there, because anything I could say would not do justice to this scenery in any way. And we were so lucky with the weather until then. For a long time, we had a free and magnificent view of both the mountains and the Howe Sound far below. Suddenly, however, clouds appeared, it started to snow, and any view (by the way, also for the remainder of the day) was gone.

After the cable car dropped us back down, we continued to our destination Whistler in Whistler Blackcomb, one of the largest ski resorts in North America, where, among other things, the alpine and nordic competitions of the Olympic Winter Games took place in 2010.

Arriving there, we checked into our hotel "Summit Lodge", where they kindly upgraded us to an Executive Suite. That's how we like it 👍🏻.

Since we had been wanting to go out for pizza for quite some time, we looked for something suitable near the hotel and found the "Pizzeria Antico", where we ordered 2 pizzas and according to Brigitte, the worst beer ever, with a very friendly service. And now the funny thing is..... instead of serving the pizza 🍕 with cutlery, they served it with a pair of scissors ✂️. That left even us speechless. But what can I say..... it worked 😋.

A short walk through the really nice village in heavy snowfall and a visit to the "Olympic Medal Plaza" then concluded another unforgettable day.